From Le Pen to Mélenchon, from Chávez to Ocalan, from Lenin to Che Guevara, from Trump to Bernie Sanders, they’re all the same. But what we emphasize here is that replacing one for another will fundamentally change nothing when it comes to this question.

We conclude that the poverty of the content of our lives is the direct result of the existential conditions which make impossible our control over our lives. So that if we want to take back our lives and end our misery, this cannot occur without tearing up from the root the material base of the totality of the existing order.

Here is Aztlán: a new nation to arise in the U.S. Southwest/West as part of the assumed patrimony of all Chicanxs, by way of a supposed shared ethnic heritage. As an anti-state communist, I desire the overthrow of capitalism en su totalidad. How then could even Chicanx anti-state communists support a plan which would inevitably align us with a new national bourgeoisie? The contradictions are glaring and would result in no liberation of the actual people which make up this “Chicanx nation” from wage labor and general exploitation. Yet another revolution forestalled in the name of national sovereignty.

...the police play their role of maintaining this set of affairs by force, by reminding those who suffer under it that it could always be much worse. The daily injustice felt there holds a functional role: those who are willing to calmly undergo a police checkpoint so that they do not lose their job will be also willing to do an extra unpaid hour of overtime to keep it.

[Originally published in French by Lundi Matin on Feb. 14th, 2016. Translated into English by ediciones ineditos. Translator's note: "banlieue" is translated as "suburbs" in this piece but in France, the "banlieues" on the outskirts of Paris carries a connotation closer to "the hood," often accompanied by xenophobic and racist stereotypes of its racialized residents.] … Continue reading “Our neighborhoods are not political deserts”

There persists a certain confusion around the notion of anti-work. "On the Origins of Anti-Work" (Echanges et Mouvement, 2005) did not escape this fate as well. The confusion consists in not sufficiently specifying the notion of anti-work. On one hand, it consists of placing in the same category as anti-work certain behaviors like worker laziness, which looks to do the least amount of work, or the preference for (compensated) unemployment or living life on the margin. These resistant acts of work refusal are as old as the proletariat itself and do not define modern anti-work. On the other hand, the confusion consists of placing in the same category as anti-work resistant practices against exploitation which are indeed pro-work, like Luddism for example. However, I believe that we should rather keep the term anti-work for the struggles of our time (since '68) that show that the proletariat is no longer a class which affirms itself in revolution as hegemonic labor and is neither a class which will make work obligatory for everyone, nor will it will replace the bourgeoisie in directing the economy.